TKFrame ver. 0.0

Copyright (c) 1997 Stefano Fornari


Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose is granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice and the following paragraph appear in all copies of this software and supporting documentation.
This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. In no event shall the author be liable to any party for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of this software and its documentation. Modifications to this software may be copyrighted by their authors and need not follow the licensing terms described here, provided that the new terms are clearly indicated on the first page of each file where they apply.

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Introduction

TKFrame is a simple custom control to create nice frames. It is inspired by the frame widget in the Tcl/TK toolkit available on most platforms.
TKFrame uses presentation parameters to manage its shape and color.

I defined two new PP (see TKFrame.h ):


There are two way to include a TKFrame control in your application. The simplest is to use TKFrame as a "local" control, visible only by the programs including TKFrame.dll. Otherwise, a little more complicated method is to install TKFrame.dll as a "public" dll, loaded at boot-time.

TKFrame as a local control

Using TKFrame is simple like including any other DLL. Follow these steps:

  1. Compile TKFrame.c

    NOTE: before compiling TKFrame.c be sure that in the function _DLL_InitTerm the TKFrame window class isn't registered with CS_PUBLIC flag
  2. In the definition file import section of your program add this line:

    TKFrame._DLL_InitTerm
  3. Compile your program with the definition file

TKFrame as a public control

A public control is a window control class registered at OS/2 boot-time.
All the standard controls are public controls: any application can create a button, an entry field, a label, and so on, without manually register their class window.
In fact, when OS/2 came-up, it loads many system dlls among which PMCTLS.DLL, which contains all standard controls.
These privileged DLLs has one specific entry in the OS2.INI file, at the application SYS_DLLS. Under SYS_DLLS there are two keys: LoadOneTime and LoadPerProcess.
DLLS in the first group are loaded in memory only at boot-time, while DLLS in the last group are loaded at the start of any new process.
PMCTLS.DLL is in the LoadPerProcess section.

It is possible to add any custom DLL under SYS_DLLS application, so it is possible to promote a custom control to become a system control.

A simple way to do this is shown in the install.cmd command file.

To build a public control follow these steps:

  1. Compile TKFrame.c

    NOTE: before compiling TKFrame.c be sure that in the function _DLL_InitTerm the TKFrame window class is registered with CS_PUBLIC flag
  2. Copy TKFrame.dll in the os2\dll directory
  3. Add TKFrame under LoadPerProcess key of the SYS_DLLS application in the file OS2.INI (install.cmd does it for you)
  4. Reboot your system
  5. Compile your program


The test program

test.c in the source directory shows how to create TKFrame controls with various styles and colors.
t1.cmd and t2.cmd are simple shortcut to compiler command line.